Heathen Valley: A Novel

by Romulus Linney

Heathen Valley, Romulus Linney’s haunting and original novel, was born from the church histories of the Valle Crucis mission in western North Carolina. Told in four parts, it is a story set in an almost unknown valley, "Heathen, a valley That Forgot God." With a quiet, muscular violence and biblical grace that readers of Cormac McCarthy will recognize, Linney takes us into the 1850s, where an idealistic Bishop from New England and a life-whipped, sorrowful transient named Starns, struggle to win souls and transform the valley. Widely reviewed when it was first published in 1962 and selected as an alternate for the Book of the Month Club, Romulus Linney’s first novel Heathen Valley was never reprinted and has never before been in paperback.

"Starns was thirty-two years old that night, but he looked fifty. He was like a much older man who comes late in life to what learning he possesses, and therefore has no fear of what he knows he will never understand." from Heathen Valley

Genres: Fiction, Plays

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

While some parts of the book dragged a little for me, I loved the parts that were written in the first person.

[Tlackey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. An Episcopal priest friend recommended it, so I bought it from Abebooks. It wasn’t available in Kindle. It’s one of those books you ache to get back to. It took me a week to read, which is unheard of because I’m a slow reader and I am reading two other books.

Why did I love it? I can’t tell you exactly. I feel at one with the setting: the North Carolina mountains. It was just a slow boil type of book where you become to care about the characters. Characters you would assume were misfits if you met them on the street, but in fact they deeply understand life and people. And they don’t let the small things discourage them.

I acknowledge I don’t know all that went on and I’m not sure I’ve grasped the underlying message: searching, discovery, vulnerability, madness, love, pain and joy.

I’m a horrible book reviewer and these notes are mostly for me, but I really felt something for this book. It’s a book to read over and over. If I didn’t have so many others to tackle.